Bergamo to Liverpool is over 1700 km by road as per Google Maps.
The company is trying to solve transportation for the 50 to 300 mile range (around 80 to 500 km). Trains can easily do this.
Anyway, in China the Beijing to Guangzhou high-speed rail covers the 2200 km distance in 8 hours. Costs $120.
-----
Do note that — while I do understand there's an environmental impact (and I hope technology improves to eliminate this impact) — I'm not against flying. I love flying. In fact I wanted to become a commercial pilot myself.
Yeah by the same token I love trains too. I’d happily get the train between Bergamo and Liverpool but as it stands we’d probably be talking €500 and 12-24 hours with multiple changes. Flights can be had from €20.
I'm not a professional Android developer, but a few years ago I did create and publish a small app to the Play Store (and discovered that there's whole new category of spammers promising to make my tiny app become #1!).
Android development is not simple. Take time to learn the architecture and underlying concepts. It took me a couple of weeks and some false starts to make sense of things (although back then I was a college student; a professional can probably get started faster).
> He's as smart as I am, so it wasn't an intelligence flaw.
I literally wow-ed out loud.
I've always felt everybody around me is much smarter than me. Now I have found the opposite personality — somebody who is fully confident about themselves.
I get that the comment came across as arrogant. However you misunderstood the point. It's not that I'm very smart, but that a superior intelligence was not the factor in me finding glasses in his reasoning. It can't be, because as I pointed out, my intelligence is not superior to his.
Of course I do get your point that I should consider whether both he and I are simply not that intelligent and that's the reason I find flaws in his arguments. It's logically sound, but I'll cling to my doubts regarding it's accuracy :-)
Argument is an art of rhetoric, not logic. Many very smart people make flawed arguments, sometimes instinctively, sometimes deliberately.
I'm not saying they should. In fact, I'll now say: they shouldn't. But whatever defect this habit is evidence of, it isn't necessarily a defect of their intelligence. Sometimes, but not always, or even usually.
There are many tiny scripts I use at work to manage things. Mostly bookkeeping stuff like utilities to manage Jira, scripts that create text files as per a predefined template for meetings etc.
I'm the only one who uses it because these are tailored for my own specific use case, but if anybody from work asks I'm willing to share.
If I knew how to use Emacs, then maybe I wouldn't have needed some of these scripts.
-----
I have a huge list of movies I want to watch or have watched, and I like keeping track of those.
For the longest time I used Google Keep, but that couldn't keep track of dates when I added to the list or watched something off the list. And I liked my list to be sorted alphabetically and have it show the counts of watched and total etc.
Tonnes of apps and websites already do this. Or I could have probably built a spreadsheet file that does this. But I felt like rolling my own.
I built a simple webapp using Laravel and a little bit of Bootstrap to make the site look decent. Did it in one day during the less than a week of gap between resigning one job and joining another. Building it was therapeutic. I even bought a domain and hosted it on a DigitalOcean droplet. It's been up for over two years now.
There's nothing fancy about it. It really is just a glorified todo list. But I like the simplicity of it and I've been using it to keep track of movies to watch over the past two years.
I never had any intention of trying to promote it or anything. Initially I planned to share it with a few friends, but then I didn't. No reason.
So it's just out there in the web. In broad daylight. Anybody can sign up for it. Nobody has. Nobody knows. Hidden in plain sight. Just like me ;)
I see so many comments about taking notes while reading. I didn't even know that was a thing. I'm not even sure if I would want to do it, because it would interrupt the reading. My own personal belief (which I came up with just now) is that reading novels should be a smooth relatively easy affair. Because I read simply for the fun of it. This may not be the case with academic books however. I just, start reading.
I have in fact stalled on books before though off the top of my head only SICP and Anna Karenina come to mind. I'll reattempt both of them in the near future. Stalling on SICP was probably due to me not having the sufficient math background, which I'm slowly working on fixing. The post you wrote gives me hope.
There's a possibility that I've been doing things the wrong way all these years.
First read, I don’t take notes unless I’m familiar with the material. At most, I’ll mark interesting passages. But I usually pause after each or every two chapters, reflecting on the concepts.
I don’t take notes with fiction books, but I pause whenever I can’t give it my full attention (interruptions, some other tasks, tired).
I think taking notes while reading fiction would be relatively unusual (outside fields like literary criticism), but taking notes while reading non-fiction is quite common, especially when grappling with denser material.
For example, I kept extensive notes while reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. The work assumes you're internalising as you go along, which is somewhat inescapable given the nature of the material. The author can't stop to re-explain some finer point of Aristotle's every time it is engaged with in the subsequent two thousand years.
Pausing to take notes helps one reflect on the material and solidify their understanding, but also gives them a quick reference later if necessary. I just use my phone's Notes app, to keep the barrier as low as possible.
> But does anyone think they can be dethroned? İs it possible?
Yes and yes.
Lookup RuPay of India.
While you're at it, also lookup UPI, also from India.
Some details I just read on its Wikipedia page[0]:
> NPCI conceived RuPay as an alternative to Mastercard and Visa, while consolidating and integrating various payment systems in India.
> ...causing Indian banks to bear the high cost for affiliation and the connection with international card associations schemes like Visa and Mastercard. This results in the need for routing transactions of which domestic account for more than 90%, through a switch located outside the country.
And, of course:
> Mastercard and Visa have raised concerns with the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) over India promoting the use of RuPay.
Most global companies (at least the US-based ones) have deployed in India, where I'm at right now. I suppose a billion people online is too big of a market to ignore (or not; I really don't know). Or there are services that I'm completely unaware of that's not in India.
Internet's pretty fast as well. Much faster than a certain conspicuous European country you'd expect to have fast internet ;)
When I was studying in the US, my roommate was studying to become a "physician assistant" — a concept I think is brilliant. I don't think there's anything similar in my own country.
But I was wondering if more physician assistants would help the doctors. Maybe they could take care of the paperwork and all those things as well.
